


Blue Jean Serenade (Songs for Your World)

by Sour_Idealist



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: 5 Times Fic, Episode: s05e13 The Big Bang, Episode: s05e6 The Vampires of Venice, Episode: s05e7 Amy's Choice, F/M, Fluff, Music, Season 5 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-22
Updated: 2011-07-22
Packaged: 2017-10-21 15:43:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,159
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/226840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sour_Idealist/pseuds/Sour_Idealist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There's more than one way, or two, or three, to tell someone you love them. Five songs Rory sang to Amy, and why.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blue Jean Serenade (Songs for Your World)

**Author's Note:**

> This was not supposed to contain sex. It did anyway. Songs are listed at the bottom. Many thanks to Ginny (teh_slush on LJ) for helping me minimize the musical mistakes.

Rory’s aware he probably shouldn’t _mention_ how much he actually likes playing the piano, at least not to most people, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t sort of love it. When the measures are flowing together into music and he doesn’t have to think, just knows where to hit the next note and the next chord and it’s almost like he pulls them out of his mind, it’s so easy to find them on the keys – well. It’s hard to explain how feels like someone different, someone with limbs that fit together right and the kind of smile that people remember and maybe the confidence to turn walls inside out.

Rory thinks the Raggedy Doctor is probably a musician, which doesn’t make a lot of sense if he tries to explain it, but music and magic just feel like the same kind of thing to him. (Rory isn’t sure whether or not the Raggedy Doctor is real, and he tries not to think about it. He’s _entirely_ sure that something horrible must have happened to the poor Doctor, because otherwise he would have abandoned Amy, and if that’s what happened… Amy doesn’t like it when people punch her friends in the mouth, he’s discovered, and she’s scary enough when she’s protecting him. He doesn’t want to be the one she’s angry at.)

Rory’s messing around with an old piece on the piano, and half-thinking and half putting the thoughts into the music, which is another of those things that he can’t quite explain afterwards, when he hears his mother cough. It’s the fourth-time sort of cough, which is bad, so he shoves the piano closed and twists around as quickly as he can.

“Aren’t you going to say hello to Amy?” his mother admonishes, gesturing, and Rory winces. Amy’s standing stock-still in the middle of the room, hands twisted around her bag of books with her knuckles as pale as her face, glaring at the wall as if it’s killed something.

Rory really hates the new psychiatrist. Amy’s been coming by after her appointments for _years,_ since her aunt got the second job, and none of the others ever made her look like this. He wants to jump up and hug her, but his mum’s still right there, and that will make her start asking questions and hovering around the doorways again, and then Amy will spend all the time she’s here watching everything she says and glancing over her shoulder instead of talking properly, and then she might start looking like this _all the time._ So Rory just bites his lip and digs his thumbs into the sides of his fingers and watches as Amy collapses onto the couch. His mother glances between the two of them, frowns, and leaves for her study with a sigh.

“Sorry,” Rory mumbles once she’s gone. “I didn’t hear you come in, or I’d have stopped.”

“You don’t have to,” she says, staring at the carpet. “You sounded good.”

“Thanks.” He smiles a little, scuffing his feet along the rug. Amy pulls one of the throw pillows into her lap. He coughs. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She kicks the ground. “Can you play anything with words?”

“Yeah, a couple songs.” He’s been practicing. The school’s got a talent show soon, and Amy dances a little, and her aunt’s been threatening to make her do something after school, and last year there were some song-and-dance acts, so he thought there couldn’t be any reason not to learn something interesting. He got a little distracted by ballads, though. “Do you want me to play one?”

“Yeah,” she mumbles, flopping backwards like a fish to stare up at the ceiling. “Uh, please.”

“Okay.” He clears his throat and twists around on the stool, hoping his voice won’t do anything strange. “Um.” Okay, one-two-three-four, and… “Well will you look at that girl with the lights coming up in her eyes,” he croons, thumping out the notes a little louder than he should. That line always makes him think of Amy, the way she grins and grabs his hand and pulls him off to make everything fast and exciting and usually muddy. “Try to shut my eyes but I can’t get her out of my sight,” he sings. Amy’s looking better, sitting up a little straighter and not so pale anymore. “She’s gonna be somebody’s only light, gonna shine tonight…”

He reaches the end of the song, lets the last note trail out gently. Amy’s leaning forward now, chin in her hands, watching him.

“You’re good,” she says quietly, once he lifts his fingers off the keys. He blushes, folding his hands in his lap.

“Thanks.” At least his voice waited until now to crack.

They sit like that for a moment as Rory struggles to stop the pleased warmth that he _knows_ is a ridiculously deep blush from spreading up his neck to his face. It doesn’t work, and he’s ready to shrink back into his own sweatshirt when he hears Amy stand.

“Wanna play poker?” she whispers. He jumps up, glancing at the door by reflex, but there’s no sign of his mum.

“Sure!” he whispers back. He always loses, but he never really buys anything but ice cream and funny pencils anyway, and Amy treats him to both when she’s got extra pocket money and it’s her fault that he has none, so it’ll all balance out.

“Thanks, Rory,” Amy whispers while she’s dealing out the cards, and that’s the last they really say about it.

\----

 “So what did you think of the movie?” Rory asks a little anxiously, knocking his foot softly against Amy’s under the afghan covering them. She shrugs, squirming a little bit against his shoulder.

“Pretty good,” she murmurs, “except for the singing-at-the-window bit.”

“What was wrong with the singing bit?” Rory asks, a little huffily. He’s really rather fond of that scene, which he’s aware makes him more than a bit of a sap. Tangled around Amy like this, it’s hard to care. “It’s a good song. Good acting.”

“Yeah, but nobody does things like that,” she protests, rummaging under the layers of rust-and-mustard yarn until she finds his free hand and wraps her fingers around it. Her hand’s still a little greasy from the popcorn, and Rory smiles.

“Some people might,” he protests. “Do you know they don’t?”

“Can you prove that anyone does?” she asks, poking him in the shoulder. “Go on, name one person you know who’s ever done that.”

“Um…” He sighs. “Well, we only know people in Leadworth.”

“Well, that was supposed to be a tiny little village, practically Leadworth. Why would people do things like that there, then?”

“All right, all right.” He kicks his feet free of the blanket, wiggling his toes in the air. Amy giggles, and he strokes her hair. “What if it did happen, then would you like it?”

“Maybe,” she grants. “Probably.”

Rory leans back and gazes at the ceiling, running over mental lists of music.

 

Several hours later he's slogging through the bushes. "This is stupid," he mutters, settling his guitar case carefully on the ground to open it. He’s probably right, but still, he’s come this far, and Amy’s bedroom light is still on above him. She’s been complaining about not sleeping much.

“Here goes nothing,” he whispers, and grabs a handful of pebbles from the edge of the garden. They hit her window with a clatter, and he can see shadows start to move on her bedroom wall. “Amy!” he calls up.

“ _Rory?_ ” She shoves her screen open and leans out, blinking down at him. “What are you –”

He lifts his guitar carefully and steps into the light, slinging it around his neck. “Er. Hi?”

“You’re kidding.”

“Ah. Sort of. Not really.” He’s blushing now, he knows, probably enough for her to see. It’s hardly the first time he’s embarrassed himself for Amy Pond – and, he thinks wryly, he’ll be damned if it’s the last – but normally it’s because of one of her ideas, not his. “Unless I shouldn’t, ah –”

“No, no, go ahead.” She props her chin on her hands. He looks at her, _really_ looks at her, in her teal cotton pyjamas and her messy damp hair, and he swallows. Well, all or nothing, then, and if he’s going to make a great romantic fool out of himself then he might as well do it properly. He bows as deeply as he can without hitting himself in the face with the guitar (which isn’t actually that deep, but enough to get the message across) and settles his fingers on the strings. Do-do du do-doe, do-do du do-doe…

“Hey, hey where did we go? Days when the rains came,” he starts out, smiling as he remembers, the two of them crashing about, hiding in the leaky tree-fort to tell ghost stories and splashing through all the puddles once they’d been dripped on enough that they didn’t care if they got wet. “Standin’ in the sunlight laughin’,” he continues, grinning, and Amy is in fact laughing above him, both hands over her mouth like she can’t believe him, and he’s incredibly glad he decided to do this after all.

“And you, mahhhhh… brown-eyed girl,” he sings, watching her smile, suddenly not caring if he wakes up the neighbours. He skips over the bits about leaving and thinking back – stupid bit of the song anyway – and builds up a bit at the end: “Do you remember when, oh, we used to sing –”

“Sha-la-lah-lah-lah-lah-lah-lah-lah-lah, lahhh-ti-da,” Amy joins in, bopping her head along with the music as she leans even further out the window, and Rory laughs between the lines, trying to memorize the way she grins, feeling like he could fly up to her if he wanted.

Instead, the minute the song’s over, Amy’s flinging herself over the sill, scrabbling down the rickety trellis that’s going to break one of these days, particularly since she’s rather bigger than she used to be. (Rory’s still trying to think of a way to point that out that isn’t open to any kind of misinterpretation whatsoever.)

“You could use the stairs,” he says instead, still grinning like a loon.

“I’m impatient,” she laughs, and practically leaps on him, setting the strings clanging on the guitar as she flings her arms around his neck and kisses him hard enough that he starts to go weak at the knees.

“I’ll have to have stupid ideas more often,” he breathes, staggering slightly; she pulls him properly onto his feet, beaming.

“Yeah,” she says, “yeah, I think you will.”

\----

“What’re you humming?” Amy asks, pausing with a lime-green boot in her hand.

“I’m not humming,” Rory protests. To his knowledge, he’s been wondering why a time machine bigger on the inside can’t have separate closets for its shoes and its ‘odd saucepan-and-flyswatter-shaped gizmos,’ or for that matter how the doctor can possibly have gotten so many closets so thoroughly crammed, and that isn’t the sort of thing that makes him hum. (Although searching for things sometimes does.) “Am I?”

“Yeah, you were,” Amy insists. “Something like… naaa na naaaa-naaa, naaa na naaaa-naaaa, na na ah ah ah na-aa” she hums, a little off-key. Rory nods.

“Oh, yeah, ah – _did you sail across the sun, did you make it to the Milky Way to see that the light’s all faded, and that heaven is overrated? Tell me, did you fall for a shooting star, one without a permanent scar, and did you miss me –”_ He’s interrupted by the Doctor sticking his head around the door, eyebrows halfway to his hairline.

“Rory. Was that _you?_ ”

He coughs, feeling like a six-year-old who’s broken a vase. “Er, yes?”

The glare the Doctor shoots at Amy is a truly ridiculous mixture of suspicion and betrayal. “You never told me he could _sing._ ”

“I might have mentioned it, you know –”

“People never mention when they’re good at things,” the Doctor says, brushing him off dismissively, “particularly not nurses who don’t get enough sleep and describe themselves as _only_ nurses. Amy, what else have you been hiding from me?”

“About Rory?”

“I play a few instruments,” he interrupts loudly. “And I’m allergic to bees.”

“What do you play? Do you play guitar, I’ve got a guitar here apparently, it’s covered in dust and probably going to ruin without anybody to play it –”

“Yeah, I play guitar. Can I see it?” The request slips out without quite thinking about it; he didn’t bring his own guitar (Rosa – yes, yes, shut up, he was sixteen and the wood is vaguely pink), too many ways to damage an instrument in space, but he’s started to rather miss the music.

The instrument the Doctor hands to him is an odd colour, strangely green and purple for something that doesn’t look painted and too smooth under his hands, but it takes surprisingly little time to get it tuned considering how dust-covered it really is. He strums a couple of chords, smiles, and hesitates uncomfortably as he realizes both the Doctor and Amy are watching him.

“Well, go on,” the Doctor prompts, flapping his hands. Rory shrugs, inching backwards to sit on an upturned box that sags worryingly but doesn’t collapse. He doesn’t really think about picking a song, just starts strumming the first one to come to mind, the one Amy accused him of humming.

“Now that she’s back in the atmosphere with drops of Jupiter in her ha-ai-aiiir,” he sings, watching Amy tuck a few wisps of red behind her ear. She’s smiling, the one he thinks of as the hot chocolate smile, warm and sweet and happy. “Since the return from her stay on the moon, she listens like spring and she talks like June…”

Amy’s swaying vaguely along with the beat now, still smiling. The Doctor does a little wriggle that is, well, probably _supposed_ to be in time, then quickly locks his arms behind his back as if to keep them under control. He’s still bouncing. Rory wants to laugh at the both of them, but he isn’t sure he’ll be able to stop in time for the next line, so he holds it in.

“Can you imagine no love, pride, deep-fried chicken,” he sings, chuckling around the last word; his fingers slip on the strings, hitting a sour note, as he remembers Amy’s story about the erased soldiers and the crack. If he’d suddenly never known her… he shakes himself; no reason to worry, she’s here and fine, and they’re hardly likely to run into the same thing again. They’re safe from that, at least. “Can you imagine no first dance, freeze-dried romance, five-hour phone conversations…”

“And did you miss me while you were lookin’ for yourself out there?” he finishes, dropping quiet and unexpectedly husky, letting the last note trail off into the TARDIS’s background hum.

Amy’s staring at him, biting her lip. Rory winces, fumbling as he puts down the guitar, wishing suddenly that he’d chosen another song.

They haven’t talked properly since Venice, what with one thing and another. He’s been telling himself he doesn’t mind, that it’s one mistake and she was a kissogram anyway and he never minded then, that the Doctor was probably right about adrenaline.

She’s still biting her lip. The Doctor coughs.

“I’ll just go, er, check on the, ah, the, you know, the thing, then? Just make sure the old girl is, um –” His voice fades as he vanishes down the hall, still chattering. Amy looks at the ceiling, the closet’s distant corner, Rory’s ear, while he studies the different segments of the floor.

“It doesn’t really matter,” he offers quietly. “I mean, just a kiss, right? No big deal, after all, I’m sure somewhere out there it’s just a way to say hello.”

“Eh, well… a bit more than a kiss,” she admits. Rory suspected as much; to his surprise, he’s mostly glad that she’s telling him everything. He sighs, shrugs, taps his feet through the ensuing silence and pats awkwardly at the box next to him. Looking surprised, she sits; the box creaks even more worryingly and sinks an inch, but stops before Rory can worry too much.

He covers her hand with his, lightly.

“I didn’t want not to marry you,” she says quietly, looking at the ceiling. “I mean, he’d already brought me back, and I was going to go to sleep and get plenty of rest and be at the church in the morning and everything. I just thought… I mean, one last hurrah, sort of. One final thing. And then he’d go again, and I’d never see him, and it would be… well, like the rest of the night. Like a dream.” She looks up, looks imploring. “It felt like it wouldn’t count, d’you know what I mean? Like it wouldn’t even be real, when I woke up, none of it.”

Rory’s never asked her, really, how much she’d ever really started to wonder, if between all the psychiatrists she’d ever thought about dreams and nightmares and the fact that she’d been so completely alone, back then. He thinks he probably should have done, at some point, if he’d found a way to ask.

He squeezes her hand.

“It’s all right,” he says quietly. “I mean, I’d prefer you didn’t go off and snog people at random as a general thing, but I understand. I think I do.”

She leans her head slowly, inch by inch, on his shoulder. “Thanks,” she mumbles, lacing her fingers up through his. He smiles, clears his throat.

“And. When we get home – I mean. All real. I’ll have seen it too.”

She squeezes his hand, hard enough to almost hurt.

It’s at that point that the box falls in beneath them, spilling the two of them onto the floor in a burst of startled laughter.

\----

Rory frowns at the wall of the TARDIS control room, at the panel that’s suddenly slid back at his touch. “Doctor, was there always a keyboard here? A piano keyboard?”

He glances over, scratching his head. “Hmm, no, I don’t think that used to be there. Silly girl,” he says affectionately, patting the console next to him, “you’re getting restless. Or do you like his music?” The lights around him blink, and he laughs. “I think she does, Rory.”

“The TARDIS?” He’s pretty much accepted that it’s got a bit of a mind, really, but it’s still hard to get used to the idea of his surroundings being able to think. It makes the bathrooms a little unnerving, for a start. “Well, that’s… flattering, I suppose.”

“It is, she’s quite picky.”

“She really is,” Amy corroborates from across the room. “You should have seen what happened when I tried to play those Beatles covers.”

Rory pats the nearest wall approvingly, chuckling, and Amy rolls her eyes. The Doctor laughs, and then the telephone rings with a rather important call from 2079, and with one thing and another (and the odd pseudo-elephant), Rory doesn’t really think about the spaceship’s keyboard-shaped hints until after the whole incident with the Dream Lord. That get him thinking, thinking about a lot of things. Amy crashing herself into a house for him ( _gambling on you,_ she insists, _I wouldn’t have done it if it weren’t for the dream thing,_ and he does his best to believe her, but he knows she doesn’t do well with being left behind), and the poor Doctor looking at the horizon and saying “There’s only one person who hates me that much,” and the Dream Lord’s smile and what he said and how frightened the Doctor looked as they all shook off the dream.

Rory can’t fix it. He can’t fix _any_ of that, and he hates it, hates it enough to pace the TARDIS halls at night until they start mysteriously leading him back to his door in defiance of the way they were laid out when he started. But the other thing seeping into his thoughts as he paces, the bits and pieces of what the Dream Lord had to say to Amy while the two of them were gone – she’s told him a little bit, vague and suddenly angry as she alludes to what was said, and the Doctor, in avoiding Rory’s questions, has mostly filled in the rest.

The thought of Amy choosing between him and the kind of life she wants, even the slightest _possibility_ of her turning into some kind of – of Stepford wife or whatever, of pretending to be happy while he misses everything that’s going on –

It makes him _sick._ It’s something he’s never even thought about until now, he’s been encouraging her for years to try and be happy and yet he somehow never even thought about it, until now, until the goddamn crystals.

 Rory isn’t really that wedded to his dream, is the thing. The key elements, yes, him and Amy – Amy being happy – and a baby and a job helping people, fixing people, but the more he thinks about it and the more places he sees the more he thinks it doesn’t matter whether that happens in Leadworth or London or on Saturn’s seventh moon.

(Rory quite liked Saturn’s seventh moon, in fact, but that’s not the point, although Amy was utterly enchanted.)

It’s about a week after the crystals, a week of rotten sleep for all of them, that the end of a long day finds the three of them settled in the control room, and Rory wanders over to the keyboard and starts plinking away with one hand, pretending to be absentminded.

Sure enough, “Play something,” Amy urges, tacking on a hurried “Please.” The Doctor nods, grinning, and the background noise of the TARDIS inexplicably quiets.

“All right, all right,” Rory says, half addressing himself to the ceiling in the vague fear that the keyboard will start to glow at him, or something, and sits down. “This song goes out to Amy Pond, with great affection,” he says, rather sheepishly mimicking the forties radio announcer they just helped, and it’s to Amy’s and the Doctor’s laughter that he starts the song. It’s by one of the singers he’s more embarrassed about liking, and so the beginning ends up a little quiet. He smiles at the keys, bashfully raising his voice a bit as he hits the soaring notes of the chorus: “Sail your sea, meet your storm, all I want is to be your harbour, the light in me will guide you home…”

He steals a glance sideways; the Doctor is frozen, Amy not quite but much more still, looking thoughtful. He smiles, losing himself in the song – it’s glorious to play, sappy or not – and makes sure to look right at Amy as soon as the tricky bit is over.

“You’ve got a journey to make,” he sings, “and a horizon to change, so go far beyond where we stand –” and thank _God,_ he manages to hold the note, “no matter the distance, I’m holding your hand.” And then it’s his favourite bit, the chorus again with just the light, simple line underneath his voice, and by the way she goes pink he suspects he does it justice.

They don’t break eye contact until he’s done, after that, which he doesn’t even realize until he lifts his fingers from the (very warm) keys and she twists around to glare at the Doctor.

“Haven’t you go got something to check on?”

He blinks at her. “Er, we’re in the control room –”

“Why don’t you go see if the swimming pool’s turned up? Or the library. Why don’t you go take a good, long look at a book in a library?”

He pauses, clearly about to argue, and then his face squinches up like a two-year-old’s; Rory would find it acutely hilarious if he didn’t have a few other things on his mind at the present moment. “Don’t touch anything!” the Doctor warns, high-tailing it down the corridor. “And don’t – keep – euch – clean up after yourselves!”

Rory chuckles as Amy closes the door. “Feels a little…” he says, gesturing around him at the consoles; Amy laughs.

“She’s a ship,” she points out. “It probably won’t look any dirtier to her than plugging something in, and you’ve done that to her plenty of times.”

Rory’s face goes the same way as the Doctor’s. “Euch,” he mutters, and then the entire idea is put out of his mind as Amy pushes him back against the wall, palms flat against his chest. He breathes deep, kisses her, reaches for the buttons on his shirt as she kisses his throat, his collarbone. “Er, that wasn’t, I mean, I just –” She nips, just a little, and he gasps, shuddering against the wall. “A very complicated way of saying I love you, I suppose. I mean –”

“Seems to be a lot of that going around,” she breathes, hot against his ear. He gulps.

“Just, I mean – I meant it, the song, that is –”

“I know. I mean this.” She undoes his belt, and he breathes in deep, muttering thanks to every deity he’s ever heard named.

\----

They stumble into the TARDIS, laughing, Amy’s heels clattering on the panels. Blending in on the Orient Express meant staying dressed in everything from the wedding except for Amy’s veil, and by some miracle their clothes aren’t ruined yet. The Doctor laughs and claps them on the back, congratulates them on a job well done, and then he glances from Rory to Amy, winks, and vanishes down the hallway.

The two of them stare at each other, blinking. Rory swallows. This is it.

Amy coughs and turns towards the other corridor. “I’ve got to use the lavatory,” she says, a little awkwardly, and Rory nods quickly.

There’s something mind-buzzing and uncomfortable about waiting – which doesn’t even make _sense,_ it’s _sex,_ it’s hardly something they haven’t done before – but still. They’re _married_ now.

Married.

He realizes he’s smiling nonsensically at the ceiling.

He shoves his hands in his pockets, sways from one foot to the other, paces across the room. He isn’t even surprised, especially, when one of the panels slides up as he passes. The keyboard is behind it.

“Good idea,” he whispers to the room, and since he feels foolish enough already, he clears his throat and adds, “Please don’t watch us, all right?”

The lights blink. So does he. “Er, thanks,” he says, and swings himself onto the stool, settles his hands happily against the keys.

The song comes to him easily, one that’s come to mind along with thoughts of Amy for a couple of years now. He barely even thinks about starting to sing; he hears Amy’s footsteps just a few moments into the little riff, and on impulse he keeps singing.

“She’s bored in a week, big dreams but nothing material,” and he turns his head to smile at her. “And I refuse to believe that love is for the weak, I said I’m not vulnerable.” She smiles back, and as he starts in on the chorus she lifts one hand to her mouth.

“She screams for more, more than just some blue-eyed metaphor,” he sings, remembering how she always grumbled about the fairy-tale characters being dull. God, he loves her. “And the trouble is, the trouble is, she’s always searching…”

Her smile’s turning overwhelmed now, one hand still at her lips and the other braced against the wall, eyes damp, and he stumbles a bit over the second chorus, roughening the bridge a bit. “I’m on one knee, lover, please, and I’ll wait for your invitation, and oh, oh, oh,” he improvises, “and I’ll keep waiting.” He’s thought about the song a lot – he’s fairly sure, hasn’t had time to puzzle it over, but he seems to remember that he played it a great deal in times where it didn’t quite belong, well before it properly existed. It’s an Amy song, and he can’t quite keep his voice steady for the last chorus, just a few solitary notes under the singing.

“Hey lady, don’t give up on me, don’t burn your heart out, love, till we’re ash over sea,” and she really is crying now, but a smile’s still peeking out behind the hands over her mouth, so that’s all right. “And hey lady, I don’t want to fight –” Hold on, hold on, keep it together for one more line.

“Like pretty girls need cowboys, I need you here tonight.”

He closes the piano, his hands shaking just a bit. Two thousand years, sifting slowly through his skull. It feels… strangely easy to believe, actually.

Amy’s blinking hard.

“Are you all right?” Rory asks quickly, shoving himself to his feet. Oh God, if he’s ruined anything… “I’m sorry, I didn’t want to –”

“It’s all right, it’s fine,” she assures him, waving her hand. Her wedding ring catches the light – wedding ring, not engagement ring. It still feels a bit unreal. “Where did –any particular reason for… all of that?”

“Um.” He shuffles a bit, trying to work out whether he has an answer to that question. “Well, I suppose not, really. I mean, that particular song, yes –”

“Yeah, about that,” she interrupts, flattening her hand against his chest and studying him. “Why?”

“Because it’s you, I suppose.” He swallows, watching her eyes go wide and frightened and soft at once. “I mean, isn’t it? Not all just at the moment, but – you know. Over the years.”

She closes her eyes, breathes in, out; she’s almost pressed against him, enough for him to feel the shudder in her fingers on his chest. When she opens her eyes, she’s smiling.

“Well,” she whispers, leaning in just a little bit more, and kisses him, twisting her hands into his already-crumpled jacket and pulling him close while his eyes slide closed and he breathes her in, kissing her back while all of space and time condenses itself into this: her, him, hearts racing, her sighing into his mouth, his own gasp. She pulls back.

“Do me a favour?” she asks, and someday he’ll figure out how she can be playful whenever she chooses. “Get me out of this dress.”

It takes a bit of work – if the lacings were any more complicated he’d be tempted to swipe the Sonic Screwdriver – but eventually he manages to get everything undone, and his fingers shake a bit as between the two of them they slide it off her shoulders, manage to hang it over the railing. They turn to each other at the exact same moment, and Rory takes a deep breath, wiping his palms self-consciously on his trousers.

“One very important thing first,” he says as she reaches for the buttons of his shirt. “I love you, Amy Pond. Entirely.”

She beams, leaning in. “Love you too,” she whispers, and kisses him again. Kisses her husband – _husband. _He kisses her back, and it's quite possibly the best moment of his life._  
_

**Author's Note:**

> The songs, in order:
> 
> 1\. ["Somebody's Baby"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umoPLztzZxw) by Jackson Brown (I wrote it imagining the [Todd in the Shadows](http://evewithanapple.tumblr.com/post/6188727518/justbelieveintheenemy-i-cannot-stop-listening) cover, however.)  
> 2\. ["Brown-Eyed Girl"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG8Ect3Xn7w) by Van Morrison  
> 3\. ["Drops of Jupiter (Tell Me)"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xf-Lesrkuc&ob=av3e) by Train  
> 4\. ["Harbor"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKDXe0FP2wc) by Vienna Teng  
> 5\. ["Hey Lady"](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spIMxShlR3A&ob=av3e) by Thriving Ivory


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